We’re seeing recovery come back, it’s getting stronger and stronger, says Careem’s Victor Kiriakos-Saad When Victor Kiriakos-Saad joined Dubai-based startup Careem last month as the company’s new UAE general manager, like many residents in the emirate he was working from home. Starting a new role is stressful at the best of times, but doing it in the middle of a global pandemic, when you cannot physically meet all your staff or lean on those next to you when things go wrong, is especially challenging. During the first few days, Kiriakos-Saad had a technical issue. He could not call up the IT department and get them to drop by to his desk, so he had to fix it himself. When he realized he needed a part, what did he do? Being the new UAE general manager for Careem, he got it biked over to his home by one of the company’s delivery teams, and the problem was solved. The incident is evidence of how the digital and online world has helped UAE residents and workers cope with the problems faced by the coronavirus pandemic, and how it has forced many companies to look again at how they do business. “I worked with a lot of corporates and in digital transformation. I noticed that people that weren’t tech-enabled suffered the most,” Kiriakos-Saad told Arab News in a Zoom interview. “For Careem, being digital and tech first, I think when COVID hit they were well prepared to overcome this challenge compared to other players that were very offline,” he said. “COVID accelerated the transformation … A person who never did any online grocery is now doing their groceries online.” That is not to say that Careem was not economically impacted by the lockdown, with workers staying at home and no longer needing regular rides to and from work. “Definitely during the lockdown the company ride-hailing-type services slowed down,” Kiriakos-Saad said. “At the peak of the crisis, I think there was a drop in ride-hailing by about 80 percent. And now we’re seeing recovery come back, it’s getting stronger and stronger.” With drivers — or captains, as Careem calls them — heavily impacted by the steep drop in business, Kiriakos-Saad said the company took action to help them. “We call them captains because we value them as an integral part of our success,” he added. The company started a campaign to help raise money for the captains, and raised around 1.7 million UAE dirhams ($462,900). “That was all toward supporting the captains,” he said.